This project pulls from a wide variety of feminist and empowerment literature, past studies, and data investigations into women’s decision-making, and research surrounding household and family norms in the various countries represented by the dataset.

Our investigation into the significant base of literature on this topic primarily covered three categories of investigation: household decision making splits between husbands and wives, women’s empowerment through education and social change, and literature surrounding marriage and legal rights in the region. One common thread through much of the literature we found based around Sub-Saharan Africa in particular emphasized the paucity of almost every type of demographic data being used. Additionally, almost every article stated that further research, especially cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, are necessary to capture the nuance found in gender equity issues. Importantly, over half of our cited sources performed analysis using Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), which are also represented in our data set. As such, the literature serves as a valuable model in our understanding of how such data can be analyzed. 

This base is relatively broad, but lacks enough detail to provide a clear window into women’s rights and health on its own. An article written by David L. Chambers provides detail on how only in the past 30 to 40 years have many countries in the region had government reform and been liberated from colonial regimes and apartheid (Chambers 2000). These governments did not aid and often inhibited demographic data collection during their reign and modern data collection efforts require more time to build up a significant corpus. Any data the authoritarian governments did collect at the time were not provided to independent researchers or organizations. The DHS dataset reflects this in the sparseness of data throughout the past half-century. Multiple studies use extrapolation techniques to create estimates that, while more accurate and meaningful than estimates, are still far from depicting the full picture of the period the data was meant to predict. An example of this is singulate mean age at marriage that is extrapolated from the percentage of women aged 40-45 to represent the mean age at first marriage; this is not a perfect technique and only provides some insight into the circumstances of the time. 

Despite the low quality of data, though, much of the literature points to the empowerment of women and better outcomes for women’s health and power. For example, child marriage is decreasing thanks to new legislation, and is reflected in demographic data trends and legal review from three studies. Over time, legislation surrounding protections of women’s rights and health has become more comprehensive (Maswikwa 2015). At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that the enforcement of said laws can be difficult to ensure, as many countries lack the economic resources to implement the systems necessary. The literature expresses that women’s empowerment is on the rise overall and slowly penetrating more rural areas, where traditions are more strongly followed. While some studies show that households where women are claiming more power are the most common places for domestic violence, other studies show that many younger women are refusing to accept the violence and that there is lower tolerance for domestic violence towards women. 

Importantly, many of these studies emphasize how empowerment has to be tailored to the specific culture and community it is being pursued in; a brute force approach doesn’t create long-term change in attitudes nor outcomes. This is emphasized in Chambers’s article through the description of the balancing act between valuing tradition and enacting progressive change seen in the rise of representative governments in South Africa, where cultures deeply steeped in tradition are exposed to radical change in a short period of time (Chambers 2000). These issues aren’t only present in South Africa, but throughout all of Sub-saharan Africa as every country was subject to colonial pursuit and exploitation. This balanced approach between progressive change and maintaining traditions is important to center in our project’s analysis.